“I made a promise to myself: I would always remember my parents’ wishes, but I would never forget myself.”
This was only one of many powerful quotes within Amy Tan’s debut novel, The Joy Luck Club. The Joy Luck Club is a carefully crafted story that highlights the relationships between four Chinese-American daughters and their immigrant parents. Each daughter has their own interests and each mother remains unwilling to relinquish their traditional upbringings. Together, they grapple with cultural differences, language barriers, and a struggle to maintain connection to their heritage. The Joy Luck Club is a “club” founded in 1939 in which four Chinese mothers gossip about their children while playing mah-jong. Throughout sixteen intertwined stories, Tan covers the daughters’ early life till adulthood as well as changes within the mother-daughter relationships. Since the mothers all grew up in traditional households, they hope to force that way of life upon their American-born daughters. However, with this generational and cultural barrier comes problems. Topics such as interracial marriages, a struggle to uphold expectations, and language impediments begin to surface. It is up to the daughters to learn to accept their heritage and up to the mothers to understand.
The main event of the book hinges around Jing-Mei, who is one of the daughters. Since birth, Jing-Mei has been separated from her twin sisters and hopes to meet them one day. This part of the book was my personal favorite, because it serves as a perfect example of how family always comes first, despite all the other obstacles present in Jing-Mei’s life.
Switching between eight different points of views, Tan did a wonderful job of providing a comprehensive view of each character’s unique perspective while also keeping me engaged at all times. I did not find the language too complicated and the change in point of views was seamless. I was especially fascinated by how well the author tackles a wide variety of themes, ranging from the challenges immigrant families face to cultural appreciation. I found this particularly present when Jing-Mei stated, “And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood.”
Moreover, the way the novel was structured is exceptional. Following a logical and consistent pattern, Amy Tan walks through different chapters of life in detail. In no parts did I feel like the plot was moving too fast and I could not fully grasp what was happening. The writing style is easy to understand and the author uses a simple yet touching way of executing this work. Not only was the delivery clean-cut, but the conversations also added to the entertaining aspect and provided me with a good laugh.
However, as much as I loved the delivery and theme, I found two major weaknesses in the novel. Amy Tan took a very outdated and mildly stereotypical stance when portraying the mothers. For example, arranged marriages was a topic that kept surfacing throughout the novel, and while it is an integral part of Chinese history, the constant descriptions could reflect negatively on Chinese people. The author only focused on the small portion of China that still has arranged marriages rather than the majority of marriages that are derived from true love. The constant presence of these stereotypes made the book a little biased, especially given the already existing unfairness against Asian Americans. Nevertheless, I understand that the novel was written in the 1980s, so this did not sway my overall opinion too much. In addition to this flaw, I also found the characters to be quite confusing. Given that there are 4 mothers and 4 daughters, I often was lost as to who was who. There is a lot of work that needed to be done regarding character descriptions and differentiating one person from another.
Compared to other books about Chinese-Americans, such as In Her Mother’s House: The Politics of Asian American Mother-daughter Writing by Wendy Ho, I found The Joy Luck Club to be much more straightforward. Some quotes such as “Why are you attracted only to Chinese nonsense?” are quite direct compared to other novels of the similar sort, but did a better job at covering a broad range of topics in a convincing fashion.
Overall, The Joy Luck Club is a well-written novel with a message worth sharing.
Image credit: Rebecca Siegel